Terrorism and the origins of Israel—Part
2By Jean Shaoul
23 June 2003

This is the conclusion of a two-part series.
Part One
was posted on June 21.

The Irgun

In contrast to the Stern/Lehi group, the Irgun
only took up the armed struggle against the British when the defeat of Germany
became imminent. At the end of 1942, Menachem Begin returned to Palestine after
his release from a Soviet labour camp in Poland. He took over as the military
commander of the Irgun and led the armed struggle—the Revolt—to get rid of the
British.

But the Irgun’s activities had nothing in
common with a revolutionary struggle to overthrow imperialism in the region.
They were also targeted against the Arabs. One of its pamphlets read, “We must
fight the Arabs in order to subjugate them and weaken their demands. We must
take them off the arena as a political factor. This struggle against the Arabs
will encourage the diaspora and consolidate it. It will draw the attention of
the nations of the world, which will be compelled to honour the people which
struggles with its arms. And an ally will be found which will support the
peoples’ army in its struggle.”

Begin, unlike the Stern group and Lehi, always
rejected the label “terrorism”, claiming that the Irgun was an army fighting a
war against another army. Using the same methods as these two terrorist groups,
the Irgun’s most well known act against the British was the blowing up of the
King David Hotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July 1946.

Lehi’s assassination of Lord Moyne in 1944—a
close friend of Churchill with whom Weizman and Ben Gurion, the Labour Zionist
leaders, had good relations—led them to crack down on both Lehi and the Irgun.
“Every organised group must spew them out... refuge and shelter must be
stringently denied these wild men... It is our hearts—not the heart of
Britain—that the terrorist iron has entered. Our hands then, no others, must
pluck it out.” [Cited by Colin Shindler in The Land Beyond Promise: Israel,
Likud and the Zionist Dream.]

The Zionist parties unite

It was the election of a Labour government in
July 1945 under Clement Attlee, anxious to maintain control over the Middle
East’s oil resources that was to lead instead to a troubled reconciliation
between the Labour Zionists and the terrorist groups.

These groups had been for years the bitterest
of political rivals. They had not even fought together in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto
uprising. What united them at this time was firstly the reversal by Foreign
Secretary Ernest Bevin of the Labour party’s previous support for the
establishment of a Jewish state. He now rejected the notion of two states—one
for the Jews and one for the Arabs—and favoured an Arab stooge regime along the
lines of those in Transjordan, Egypt and Iraq, where Jews would be guaranteed
minority rights.

Secondly, and for similar reasons, the Labour
government also opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine. Under conditions where
neither Britain nor the US were prepared to open their doors to the hundreds of
thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, the Jews would have had to remain in
the displaced persons camp and in the countries of their persecution.

In November 1945, the Haganah (the Labour
Zionists’ military wing and by far the largest of the three military groups),
the Irgun and Lehi signed an agreement to establish the United Resistance
Movement to drive the British out of Palestine. This was to last for less than a
year—until the King David Hotel bombing—when Ben Gurion terminated the agreement
calling the Irgun “the enemy of the Jewish people”. Despite this, the scale of
the terrorist attacks increased tenfold.

Faced with increasing hostility and disruption
in Palestine and rejection by both Arabs and Jews of a bi-national state,
Britain referred the conflict to the United Nations, fully expecting the UN to
hand Palestine back to Britain to deal with. But Britain’s hopes of resolving
the conflict in Palestine on its own terms were to be thwarted. The major
powers, including the US and the Soviet Union, actively supported the
establishment of a Jewish state for their own purposes: they saw it as a way of
blocking Britain’s position in the Middle East. This, plus the worldwide
sympathy that the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry evoked, led the
UN in November 1947 to vote for the partition of Palestine. In May 1948, the
British withdrew from Palestine and the Zionists immediately declared
independence and the establishment of Israel. War broke out between Israel and
the Palestinians, led by the Arab feudalists, for control of the land.

The Revisionist groups used all the training
and methods they had developed and used against the British to terrorise and
intimidate the Palestinians. The planned terrorist activities, carried out by
the Irgun and Lehi, and sanctioned by the Labour Zionists, were to play a major
role in driving the Palestinians from their homes. The massacre at Deir Yassin,
where more than 200 men, women and children were slaughtered, is only the
best-known example. Ben Gurion himself encouraged the Haganah, largely under the
control of the Histadrut/Mapai Party and forerunner of the Israeli Defence
Forces, to expel the Palestinians from their homes. The expulsion of the
Palestinians, who were destined to become refugees in neighbouring countries and
dispersed throughout the world, and the takeover of their land were the
essential prerequisites for the founding of the state of Israel.

From underground terrorist groups to
the political mainstream

Immediately after the end of the war, Menachem
Begin, leader of the Irgun, transformed the Irgun into a political party, Herut,
in opposition to the official Revisionists. Vehemently opposed to any
concessions to the Arabs and an agreement with Abdullah that had absorbed the
West Bank into his kingdom of Transjordan, now renamed Jordan, Begin glorified
the Irgun’s underground terrorism and its role in driving out the British. His
inflammatory language and style were more than a little reminiscent of the
nationalist ethos of Eastern Europe and Pilsudksi’s military nationalism in
Poland during the 1930s.

Committed to the recovery of Palestine, he and
the Herut party denounced those who opposed such a perspective as the enemies of
the Jewish people. Coming after the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun arms
ship, at the hands of the Labour Zionists and in which several members of the
Irgun were killed, it was a virtual declaration of civil war against Ben Gurion.
Not a few thought that the Herut might mount a putsch.

In the first elections, where nearly all the
political parties claimed some affiliation to socialism, Begin’s Herut party was
the largest non-socialist party, winning 11 percent of the vote and 14 out of
the 120-member Knesset. The official Revisionists won no seats at all. Begin
assumed the mantle of Revisionism and became the leader of the right-wing
opposition to the Labour Zionists.

In the early years of the Zionist state, the
Herut vote declined and Begin was to spend the next 30 years in the political
wilderness, transforming and expanding the Herut party into the Gahal in 1965.
He briefly joined the war coalition set up prior to the June 1967 war against
the Arabs that took advantage of the situation provoked by the reckless
opportunism of Nasser, the Egyptian leader, to significantly expand Israel’s
borders.

The conquest of the West Bank and Gaza breathed
new life into the far-right forces, leading to the formation of the Likud party
in 1973, which went on to win the largest number of seats in the 1977 elections.
The ultra-nationalist right wing political force, which had always been on the
fringe, had now become the mainstream, displacing the old political
establishment.

While the Lehi went on to form the Moledet
party, an even more nationalist outfit than Likud, whose noxious policies
include ethnic cleansing: the removal of the Palestinians from the territories
occupied by Israel.

Shamir himself retired from active politics in
the 1940s. When Ben Gurion lifted the ban on Lehi members taking up official
positions, Isser Harel, the Mossad chief, immediately recruited Shamir and
others. It was Shamir who planned the letter-bomb campaign against German
scientists working for Nasser’s Egypt in the 1960s that brought him into
conflict with Shimon Peres, then deputy Minister of Defence. He joined the Herut
party as the only party that had not renounced the idea of an Israel that
extended “from the Nile to the Euphrates” in 1970. Shamir cultivated the links
with the anti-socialist minded Russian Jews that were seeking to leave the
Soviet Union and brought them into the Likud party. He became prime minister in
1983 when Begin suddenly resigned—signifying an even further shift to the right
in Israeli politics.

It is the political heirs of terrorists like
Stern, Begin and Shamir that now form Israel’s political establishment and the
Bush administration’s chief ally in the region. They are now able to put into
practice the policies that their antecedents could only dream of. Their history
also shows why Israeli politics have always been so fractious. The civil war
that is never far beneath the surface has long standing basis.

While the establishment of the state of Israel
was hailed at the time as a new and progressive entity dedicated to building a
democratic and egalitarian society for the most cruelly oppressed people of
Europe, the history of the origins and development of the Zionist state has
shown that that was always a chimera. It is impossible to build a socially
progressive society on the basis of a nationalist perspective. The Zionist
perspective, be it the Labour Zionists or its ultra-reactionary variant, has
played a poisonous role in strengthening imperialism and chauvinism, bolstering
the power of the national bourgeoisie on the one hand and dividing the working
class and rural poor on the other.

It is noteworthy that the publication of the
British intelligence files attracted little attention from the press. Apart from
reporting the contents, no political commentators sought to draw attention to
either the methods used to spawn the Zionist state or the Israeli government’s
political roots.

Within Israel itself, the liberal paper
Ha’aretz merely carried a Reuters report under the headline “Document: UK
feared influx of Zionist terrorists in post-WWII era”, as though Zionist
terrorism was some aberration rather than an integral part of their perspective
and programme. The article itself focused on the anti-Jewish measures put in
place by the British authorities to combat Zionist terrorism. While explaining
that the files were written in the aftermath of the bombing of the King David
Hotel bombing, the article remained silent on the Irgun and Menachem Begin’s
role in the bombing—even though it went on to note that Begin received a Nobel
Peace Prize for his peace agreement with Egypt. Neither did it mention the plans
to assassinate the foreign secretary and leading British political figures.

Such professional and political honesty would
only have drawn attention to the terrorist origins and role of the Zionist
political establishment on whom the political gangsters in the Bush
administration use as a pawn to divide and rule the Middle East.